The rest of us will despair of ever being able to write prose so immaculate as that of Paul West.

The Washington Post

Paul West

Paul West was born in 1930 in England, and educated at Oxford and Columbia Universities. He has written poetry, essays, literary criticism, and memoirs and has published fifty books in all—twenty-four of which are novels. West’s writing can be found in AGNI, The Yale Review, Harper’s, and Conjunctions. He once said, “Literature is here to disturb us and make us more aware,” and his writing often seems to focus on a character’s inadequacies. Whether it’s a failed relationship, abuse, or societal inadequacy. West has taught at Brown, Cornell, and Arizona and his honors include a 1993 Lannan Prize for Fiction, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, three Pushcart Prizes, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1996 the French government made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He has lived in the U.S. since 1957, and is married to Diane Ackerman, a writer, poet, and naturalist. In 2003 he had a massive stroke that left him with aphasia, and despite this he has since published three books. He presently resides in Ithaca, NY.

cover image of the book A Fifth of November

A Fifth of November

In A Fifth of November, Paul West creates a mesmerizing tale with the events surrounding the English Gunpowder Plot (1605). Instigated by thirteen Catholic conspirators, most famously Guy Fawkes, the Plot was a failed attempt to blow up the English Parliament and King James I. At the heart of West’s novel are the trials of Father Henry Garnet, superior of the English Jesuits, who is hidden from the king’s henchmen behind the walls of English mansions. Shielding him from harm is the melancholy noblewoman Anne Vaux, a Catholic sympathizer. A Fifth of November tells the tale of Garnet: from when he first hears of the plot––the conspirators have confessed their plan to him, what is his responsibility?––to his imprisonment in the Tower of London. All along, the figures who partake of this historical moment are brightly, often horrifically, drawn. In A Fifth of November, West tackles through his rhapsodic language, brilliant characterizations, and historical precision that inevitable topic: human evil.

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cover image of the book Cheops

Cheops

Known for wrapping readers in his historical web, Paul West, in his marvelous new novel Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun, turns his attention to the 4th Dynasty (approx. 2680 BC) of ancient Egypt. Here, we find the pharaoh Cheops, building the great pyramids at Giza, surrounded by workers and solar boats. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, “a hundred thousand men were made to toil constantly for him,” and, as Herodotus claimed, Egypt was “plunged into all manner of wickedness.’ In Cheops, West delightfully has Herodotus transported back in time, to meet the great pharaoh face to face. Nearing death, getting ready for his final “transportation to the stars,” the blind Cheops is obsessed with preparing for his end. All the while, the intrigues of his daughters, sons, wives, and courtiers are revealed, uncovering murder, incest, and rebellion. Perhaps most intriguing is the overarching narration by Osiris, god of the Nile. While managing to “pipe” the music of English composer Frederick Delius into the dying Cheops’s ears, he comments on this swarm of events with hilarious and humane authority. Profound and entertaining, Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun is perhaps Paul West’s greatest novel yet.

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cover image of the book The Dry Danube

The Dry Danube

The Dry Danube––Paul West’s nineteenth novel––presents Hitler’s “memoir” of the years he spent as a failed art student in Vienna, just before World War One. Each of the book’s four parts is a solid raving block of barbaric flourishes, free of paragraphing in its headlong rush of disgorged spleen. Dazzling and daring, caustic and ironic, The Dry Danube is a plunge into what cannot, ordinarily, be articulated. However, as Joseph McElroy noted of Paul West, “There seems to be nothing that he cannot and will not imagine––nothing human that his compassionate interest can’t find its own hilarious and surprising way into, no mode of feeling he can’t find the original language for.” The Dry Danube more than bears out McElroy’s opinion. Here West tackles the inhuman––the monstrous. “I wanted to get at H. before the violence sets in,” West remarked. “But most of all I wanted to get the motion of his mind, as seen by another.” Hitler spews his rage over his blighted career and his desperate wooing of Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, “proud famous painters both.” These “two men so important in my young life, yet so aloof from me,” he tries to befriend, though “I would have had more success groveling before a statue of Frederick the Great or Charlemagne.” (“These men do not so much control Art, they are Art. It makes you sick to think of it.”) A risky venture, The Dry Danube stands a triumph––baroque, chilling (“This was not the last the world would hear of me”), and scathingly humorous at the same instant.

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The rest of us will despair of ever being able to write prose so immaculate as that of Paul West.

The Washington Post

West’s taut little immorality tale crackles with verbal energy, flexibility, and passion. One of his most fully realized fictions.

Kirkus Reviews
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